Russell Moore: Why Jesus Doesn't Promise Us an "Afterlife"

There is a great article in Christianity today by Russell Moore called "Why Jesus Doesn't Promise Us an 'Afterlife'".

Take a few minutes to read it all but here are a couple good quotes:

"Often we Christians start our gospel proclamation with triumph over sin. Fair enough: The gospel of Christ is indeed the reversal of sin, and of death and hell. But without a broader context, such teaching can treat Christ as a means to an end, a step from the alpha of Eden to the omega of heaven. In a truly Christian vision of the kingdom of God, though, Jesus of Nazareth isn't a hoop we jump through to extend our lives into eternity. Jesus is the kingdom of God in person. As such, he is the meaning of life, the goal of history, and the pattern of the future. The gospel of the kingdom starts and ends with the announcement that God has made Jesus the emperor—and that he plans to bend the cosmos to fit Jesus' agenda, not the other way around."

"Our preaching isn't just information sharing; it's the voice of Jesus through his kingdom assembly, clearing the way for the new regime (2 Cor. 5:20). If you want to know how the kingdom works, look at how we care for and honor the poor (James 2:5). If you want to see our "platform" for how we'll run the universe with Jesus, watch our congregational decision-making meetings (1 Cor. 6:1-8). Even our "spiritual gifts"—so misunderstood in contemporary times as means for "plugging people in" to programs—are kingdom resources. Your gift—whether mercy, hospitality, teaching, or encouragement—is a "spoil of war" (Eph. 4). Jesus is "staffing up" his kingdom now, like a presidential transition team establishing a shadow government between Election Day and Inauguration Day."

"If the kingdom is what Jesus says it is, then what matters isn't just what we neatly classify as "spiritual" things. The natural world around us isn't just a temporary "environment," but part of our future inheritance in Christ. Our jobs—preaching the gospel, loading docks, picking avocados, writing legislation, or herding goats—aren't accidental. The things we do in church—passing offering plates, cuddling crack-addicted babies, or fixing the "pop" in the sound system—aren't random. God is teaching us, as he taught our Lord, to learn in little things how to be in charge of great things (Matt. 25:14-23)."

"Perhaps we dread death less from fear than from boredom, thinking the life to come will be an endless postlude to where the action really happens. This is betrayed in how we speak about the "afterlife": it happens after we've lived our lives. The kingdom, then, is like a high-school reunion in which middle-aged people stand around and remember the "good old days." But Jesus doesn't promise an "afterlife." He promises us life—and that everlasting. Your eternity is no more about looking back to this span of time than your life now is about reflecting on kindergarten. The moment you burst through the mud above your grave, you will begin an exciting new mission—one you couldn't comprehend if someone told you. And those things that seem so important now—whether you're attractive or wealthy or famous or cancer-free—will be utterly irrelevant. "

Satan Won't Care

Pastor, Satan doesn’t mind if you preach on the decrees of God with fervor and passion, reconciling all the tensions between sovereignty and freedom, as long as you don’t preach the gospel. Homeschooling mom, Satan doesn’t mind if your children can recite the catechism and translate the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” from English to Latin, as long as they don’t hear the gospel. Churches, Satan doesn’t care if your people vote for pro-life candidates, stay married, have sex with whom they’re supposed to, and tear up at all the praise choruses, as long as they don’t see the only power that cancels condemnation—the gospel of Christ crucified. Satan so fears that gospel, he was willing to surrender his entire empire just to stave it off. He still is.

- Russell Moore from Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ

Why the Insomnia of Jesus Matters to Us

By Russell Moore - Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

When the disciples screamed in the face of a storm, Jesus slept (Mk. 4:37-38). When Jesus screamed in the face of a cross, the disciples slept (Mk. 14:37)

Why could Jesus sleep so peacefully through a life-threatening sea-storm, and yet is awake all night in the olive garden before his arrest, crying out in anguish? Why are the disciples pulsing with adrenaline as the ship is tossed about on the Galilee Lake, but drifting off to slumber as the most awful conspiracy in human history gets underway?

Peter, James, and John rebuke Jesus for falling asleep on the boat: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mk. 4:38) Jesus rebukes them for falling asleep as he prays before the cross: “Could you not watch one hour?” (Mk. 14:37)

Jesus isn’t the anxious sort. He tells us, remember, to be anxious for nothing, to take no thought for tomorrow (Matt 6:25-34). So why is he awake all night, “greatly distressed and troubled” (Mk. 14:33). In the storm, Jesus dismisses the disciples’ terror with a wave of the hand. In the garden, he screams, with loud cries and tears (Heb. 5:7), until the blood vessels in his face explode.

It is because Jesus knows what to fear. Jesus knows to fear not him who can kill the body, but instead Him who can cast both body and soul into hell (Matt. 10:28). Jesus doesn’t fear the watery deeps, which can be silenced by his voice. But he knows that is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Danger doesn’t keep Jesus awake; the judgment of God does.

The disciples are just the opposite, and I fear I am too. They are worried about relatively meaningless things, things that need only to be given over to the attention to Jesus. But they are oblivious to the cross that overhangs the cursed world around them, and within them.

I lose sleep quite often over the things Jesus tells me I should not worry about: my life, my possessions, my future. Such is not of the Spirit. Why is it easier for me to worry about next week’s schedule, and to lose sleep over that, than over those around me who could be moments away from judgment? Why am I more concerned about the way my peers judge my actions than about the Judgment Seat of Christ?

The Spirit of Jesus joins us to him in his Gethsemane anguish. We groan with him for the revealing of the sons of God, for resurrection from the dead (Rom. 8:23-27). We like him, through the Spirit, come to terms with the crosses we must carry. And, through it all, we cry with him, “Abba, Father!” (Mk. 14:36; Rom. 8:15).

The next time you find yourself unable to sleep due to worry, ask whether you’re in the Galilee waters or the Gethsemane garden. Ask yourself whether your wakefulness is of the weakening flesh or the awakening Spirit.

Why You’re Tempted

By Russell Moore:

I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

Maybe you tear up when you think about the words you screamed at your kids this morning. Maybe you’ve deleted the history cache of your computer this week, again, promising yourself that you’ll never access those images again. Maybe you carry that empty snack bag in your purse to throw away later, so people in your office won’t see it in the wastebasket. Maybe the prescription drugs in your desk drawer right now are the only things keeping you sane, and you fear they’re making you crazy. Maybe you just can’t stop thinking about the smell of your co-worker’s hair, or the clink of the whiskey glass at the table nearby.

Maybe what you’re tempted to do is so wild that I wouldn’t feel comfortable posting it on this page, or maybe it’s so tame that I wouldn’t even think to mention it. I don’t know. But I think I know what’s behind it all.

You’re being tempted right now, and so am I. Most of the time we don’t even know it. And, in every one of those moments, we want either to overestimate or underestimate the power of that temptation. We overestimate it by thinking something along the lines of, “I have these feelings, so therefore I’m predestined to be this kind of person.” We underestimate it by thinking something along the lines of, “I’m not tempted to do anything terrible, like adultery or murder. I’m just struggling with this small thing, say, bitterness over my infertility.”

But it’s there, and it’s wild.

Temptation is so strong in our lives because it’s not about us. Temptation is an assault by the demonic powers on the rival empire of the Messiah. That’s why conversion doesn’t diminish the power of temptation, as we often assume, but actually, counter-intuitively, ratchets it up.

If you bear the Spirit of the One the powers rage against, they will seek you out. They want to tear down the icon of the Crucified One that they see embedded in you (1 Pet. 4:14; Rev. 12:17). We’re targeted because we resemble our firstborn brother, Jesus.

We all, whether believers or not, bear some resemblance to Jesus because we share with him a human nature, the image of God. As we come to find peace with God through Jesus, though, we begin a journey of being conformed more and more into the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29). The demons shriek in the increasing glory of that light, and they’ll seek even more frenetically to put it out of their sights.

This post is adapted from my new book, Tempted and Tried.

Why I’m Ungrateful

This is from Russell Moore who is Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

 

“If I hear the word ‘Daddy’ again, I’m going to scream!”

I heard myself saying those words. And, in my defense, it was loud around here. I was trying to work on something, and all I could hear were feet pounding down the stairs with four boys competing with one another to tell me one thing after another. I just wanted five minutes of silence.

My vocal chords were still vibrating when an image hit my brain. It was the picture of me, on my face, praying for children. The house was certainly quiet then. And in those years of infertility and miscarriage and seemingly unanswered prayers, I would have given anything to hear steps on that staircase. I feared I would never hear the word “Daddy,” ever, directed to me. Come to think of it, I even wrote a book about the Christian cry of “Abba, Father.”

And now I was annoyed. Why? It wasn’t that I’d changed my mind about the blessing of children. It was that my family had become “normal” to me. In the absence of children, the blessing was forefront on my mind. But in their presence, they’d become expected, part of what I expected from my day-to-day existence. And that’s what’s so dangerous.

Gratitude is spiritual warfare. I’m convinced my turn of imagination that day was conviction of sin, a personal uprooting of my own idolatry by the Spirit of Christ. What I need to fear most is what seems normal to me.

We’re all, in some way or other, in the same place the people of Israel were in in Joshua 23 and 24. Joshua, their warrior-leader, stands before them and recounts all the blessings God has given, reminding them that “not one word has failed of all the good things that the Lord God promised concerning you” (Josh. 23:14a). Joshua said, “All have come to pass for you; not one of them has failed” (Josh. 23:14b).

And yet, as Joshua foretold (and Moses before him), the people would soon be in the land of olive trees and wine presses. These things, what they’d cried for in the wilderness, would soon seem “normal” to them. And, soon enough, they’d crave more and more, so much so that they’d chase after Canaanite idols to get what they wanted.

This is what some philosophers call “hedonic adaptation.” We tend to adjust to the level of happiness or prosperity we have. We grow to expect it, to not even notice it. And then we want more. That’s why it’s so hard for people to come down in standard of living. It’s easy to move from a studio apartment to a two-story house, but it’s awful to do the reverse. Few people have a problem going from a 1985 Ford Fairmont to a brand new BMW, but it’s incomprehensible to go the other direction.

This is the way of all flesh, as it is pulled toward the abyss by the satanic powers. It is always so. The garden of Eden becomes mere vegetation for blinded humans in the beginning. The mountains and caves become mere covering for blinded humans in the end.

The Spirit of Christ draws us toward gratitude because the Spirit convicts us of our creatureliness. We’re dependent on breath, on bread, on love, and these things come, personally, as gifts from a Father (Jas. 1:17).

Is there anything in your life that you’ve grown accustomed to? Is there something you prayed for, fervently, in pleading in its absence that you haven’t prayed for, fervently, in thanksgiving in its presence? There’s several such things in my life, and, I fear, many more that I don’t even think about.

I’m typing this at the kitchen table. I was just interrupted by Moore boys wrestling for the last Little Debbie Cake in the pantry. As soon as I heard “Daddy,” I looked up, even in writing this article, in frustration. But the Spirit still crucifies, still resurrects.

Thank You.

My Neighbor is Invisible

Good post by Dr. Russell Moore:

It’s easy for me to love my neighbor. It’s easy, that is, as long as my neighbor is invisible.

By that I mean to ask, have you noticed how abstract and ethereal so much of our Christian rhetoric is on virtually every topic?

Some Christians rattle on and on about “The Family” while neglecting their kids. Some Christians “fight” for “social justice” by “raising consciousness” about “The Poor” while judging their friends on how trendy their clothes are. Some Christians pontificate about “The Church” while rolling their eyes at the people in their actual congregations. Some Christians are dogmatic about “The Truth” while they’re self-deceived about their own slavery to sin.

I think that’s a tendency for most of us, in some way or another. We affirm all the right things, whether in Christian doctrine or Christian practice, even fight with one another about them. But it’s all just up there in the abstract. These things are “issues,” not persons.

“The Family” never shows up unexpected for Thanksgiving or criticizes your spouse or spills chocolate milk all over your carpet; only real families can do that. “The Poor” don’t show up drunk for the job interview you’ve scheduled or spend the money you’ve given them on lottery tickets or tell you they hate you; only real poor people can do that. “The Church” never votes down my position in a congregational business meeting or puts on an embarrassingly bad Easter musical or asks me to help clean toilets for Vacation Bible School next week; only real churches can do that. “The Truth” never overturns my ideas and expectations; only the revelation of God in Christ does that.

As long as “The Family” or “The Poor” or “The Church” or “The Truth” are abstract concepts, as long as my interaction is as distant as an argument or as policy, then they can be whoever I want them to be.

The Spirit warns us about this. Jesus lit into the Pharisees for “fighting for” the Law of God while ignoring their financial obligations to their parents, all under the guise of their religious advocacy (Mark 7:10-12).

And James, particularly, shows us the difference between “fighting” for a cause, and loving people. “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” (James 2:15-16). “Be warmed and filled” is advocacy; “get in here” is love.

If our love is for invisible people, is it any wonder they’re dismissing an incredible gospel?